Google goes on an updating spree
No day goes by recently that Google does not make a significant announcement. Now they have gone on an updating spree with a number of their products.
Google Docs: New features updates in Google Docs have been unveiled, such as searches being sorted by relevance instead of date. You can now also export your entire collection of documents to back up or migrate. Also is is possible to attach a document in an email and send it. Finally, you can now change the owner of a spreadsheets.
The mail-in feature for documents has unfortunately be discontinued. Earlier you could mail any document to a unique email address given by Google to have it automatically imported into docs. However a no of issues with this service prompted its closing.
Google Apps: Google Groups have now been added as a feature of Google Apps for Premium and Educational account holders. This will allow all such customers to provide Groups like functionality which will work out of their own domain. Sharing between groups is already something which has been quite simplified, for example documents can be shared by all members of a group by sharing it with the group id.
Google Wave: Some groups functionality has been added to Google Wave as well. Now you can add Google Groups contacts to your wave account, and a Wave shared with any Google group member will be shared with all of them.
Google Picasa: The Picasa application has seen an update to v3.6 with improved tagging features and support for collaborative albums. Collaborative albums — a relatively new feature in Picasa Web — allow any user to create an album in which multiple people can contribute photos. Now this features is in the desktop app as well, which will let you upload images to a friends album, or set enable an album to accept contributions from the interface.
The name tag feature introduced in Picasa 3.5 has also been improved. Now you can enable / disable face detection on a per folder basis. Additionally, you will now see the list of people tagged while browsing a folder.
Google Chrome: Since the Extensions gallery has opened, Google has also released v4 of the Chrome browser as beta enabling a larger audience to enjoy the facility of extensions. Beta versions of the Chrome browser are now also available for Linux and Mac OS.